New from Cambridge University Press!

Edited By Keith Allan and Kasia M. Jaszczolt

This book "fills the unquestionable need for a comprehensive and up-to-date handbook on the fast-developing field of pragmatics" and "includes contributions from many of the principal figures in a wide variety of fields of pragmatic research as well as some up-and-coming pragmatists."

This collection of articles takes up the issue of Contact Morphology raisedby David Wilkins in 1996. In the majority of contact-related studies,morphology is at best a marginal topic. According to the extant borrowinghierarchies, bound morphology is copied only rarely, if at all, becausemorphological copies presuppose long-term intensive contact with priormassive borrowing of content words and function words. On the other hand,especially in studies of morphological change, contact is often identifiedas the decisive factor which triggers the disintegration of morphologicalsystems. However, it remains to be seen whether these two standardtreatments of morphology in contact situations exhaust the phenomenology ofContact Morphology.

The 14 papers of the present volume shed new light on the behavior ofmorphology under the conditions of language contact. Fresh empirical datafrom 40 languages world-wide are presented and new theory-based conceptsare discussed. "Morphologies in Contact" is a first in the history of bothmorphology and language contact studies. It is meant to mark the beginningof an international research program which explores the entire range ofaspects connected to morphologies in contact and thus, paves the way for afull-blown Contact Morphology qua linguistic discipline.